Vegan Chocolate Marbled Pound Cake — Easy

I’m ending the pound cake trials with a vegan recipe. Why? Because I had to. Vegan Chocolate Marbled Pound Cake seemed like a real challenge, but as it turns out, it wasn’t. I started with a basic tofu pound cake, made a few small changes and threw in a chocolate marble. The results were impressive. This cake is not nearly as decadent as the cream cheese pound cake, but it’s moist and delicious and should be approved by vegans and non-vegans.

What’s great about this one is there are no strange and unusual ingredients. Almond milk maybe, but considering my mom buys it at her small town grocery, I don’t think it’s exotic. Plus, you could always substitute soy milk.

For this cake, I used a 9×5 inch loaf pan. That worked well, but the cake is a bit short in stature so I plan on making my next one in an 8×4 inch loaf pan.

Cook time was a surprisingly quick 30 minutes. Considering most pound cakes take 45 minutes to an hour, this was a bonus.

This was a great little cake, but I thought of a few variations along the way which might be worth trying. They are listed below.

Sift together cake flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in large bowl; set aside.

Process tofu, sugar, vegetable oil, almond milk and vanilla until smooth. Add tofu mixture to flour mixture and stir with a wooden spoon until fairly smooth. Measure out a little less than 1 cup of batter and mix with melted chocolate.

Pour most of the vanilla batter into pan, top with a line of chocolate batter, then arrange whatever remaining vanilla batter you have on top. Bake for 30 minute or until a wooden skewer inserted comes out clean.

** I only have a 9×5 and that worked out fine, but I think the cake would look better made in a smaller pan. It would be taller rather than spread out and short.

Variation Ideas

Flavor the chocolate batter with a bit of instant espresso powder or chipotle powder. Or, for your melted chocolate, melt one of the fancy flavored chocolates.

Instead of almond milk, you could try using regular coconut milk. This would definitely add moistness and would probably and probably some coconut flavor.

Tofutti makes a vegan cream cheese with tofu. Not sure if it would work, but why not try using 5 oz vegan cream cheese instead of tofu. You’d have a richer cake. Might be a total failure, but worth a try.

Comments

Hi Anna,
Thanks so much for your help. You are correct about the pan size, but I was going to double the recipe so hopefully that will keep it from going being too thin. This is the recipe, but I will be replacing the flour with bobs red mill gluten free flour blend. (the birthday girl has celiacs). I have used this in other recipes before without a problem so I am not too worried about that.http://www.theppk.com/blog/, to the just chocolate cake entry.
I have also used this recipe as cupcakes before and they are quite delicious. Its from the Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World Book.

I hope you all try this. I cut mine into slices, froze it, then wrapped it in foil. Today I took out a frozen slice, thawed it out and ate it for a snack. It was great! Now I need to go out and find some vegans to share it with ;).

Lisa, going on the assumption that your big glass pan is 13×9 inches and your springform is a 9 inch, a 13×9 inch cake might come out a little on the thin side. If you don’t mind it being thin and the 13×9 inch is all you have, then you can still do it. The rule I follow when going from metal to glass is to reduce the recipe temp by 25 degrees. So the recipe says to cook the cake at 350 for 30 minutes, you’d want to try 325 and CHECK at 30 minutes.

If you email me the recipe, I’ll take a look at it and email you some suggestions. Do you have room at school for a springform pan? They’re only about $15 at Target and you will probably get a lot of use out of one.

Hi Anna!
Yum! I am a vegana dn that pound cake looks incredible. I have a quick question for you. I am baking a cake for a vegan friends birthday coming up. The directions on the cake recipe say to bake the cake in a spring form pan, which is metal. However, all i have at school is a big glass sheet pan. Can I safely bake the cake in this pan? Do I need to do anything special with the temperature/baking time?
Thank you!
Lisa

It’s so funny–only a few days ago, you said you had no go-to marble pound cake recipes and now you have 4+ with variations!

And now I’m seeing marbled cake everywhere–I just turned on the TV to an episode from a new series of Cook’s Country by the makers of America’s Test Kitchen featuring homemade Jell-O ‘poke cake’ which is like marbled strawberry white cake with frosting.

Hmm – this looks good! I have a vegan co-worker who never gets to partake in our birthday celebrations (which usually involve non-vegan baked goods). I think I might try to make this for her one day soon!

This does sound easy and looks great, Anna. I am trying more and more vegan baking and have had very few disappointments. I have not done a tofu-based dessert yet so thanks for the inspiration to do so soon.

That looks great Anna! I’ve been baking a few vegan things but I have yet to try baking with tofu. That seems to have a great texture, specially the chocolate swirl, very moist! I like it has no strange ingredients, that’s one thing that turns me down in most vegan recipes.

Joanna, I was lucky enough to find some taste testers at my daughter’s school. Todd dropped it off for me this morning. Also, since I made one of the pound cakes on Saturday, I froze it and thawed it before serving. It had an even better texture after being frozen.

About Tofutti. I once used it in some vegan cream cheese frosting. It was excellent.

I’m afraid to ask exactly how much pound cake you have in your house! You probably never want to see it again. haha And I am addicted to Tofutti. I can’t tell the difference from that and real cream cheese at all. I commend you on your experiments! nice work!